Bangladesh PM calls emergency meeting with varsity heads as student leaders refuse call for dialogue

Bangladesh PM Sheikh Hasina holds emergency meeting amid student protests, tensions rise as leaders demand resignation.

Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina called an emergency meeting with university vice-chancellors and college principals on Saturday night amid heightened tensions as student movement leaders refused here invitation for talks and demanded her resignation, days after over 200 people died in anti-quota protests.

Bangladesh recently witnessed violent clashes between the police and mostly student protesters demanding an end to a controversial quota system that reserved 30% of government jobs for relatives of veterans who fought in Bangladesh's War of Independence in 1971.

The Prime Minister held a "view-exchange meeting with the vice-chancellors of public and private universities, senior teachers and college principals at Ganobhaban (PM’s official residence),” a PMO spokesman said.

Without giving any detail, he said the meeting discussed the “overall situation created over the students’ campaign and the way out to overcome it”, while the teachers vowed to work in unison to “save the students from the clutches of the evil forces”.

The nearly three hour-meeting started at around 8:15 p.m. (BST) after tens of thousands of students, their guardians and ordinary people joined a mammoth protest rally at Central Shaheed Minar in Dhaka against the killings and mass arrests over quota system for government jobs.

The protestors chanted anti-government slogans, some calling for the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina while identical protests were staged in several other major cities amid reports of scattered clashes.

The protest leaders called for an all-out civil disobedience movement from Sunday and asked officials and law enforcement agencies to stand by them instead of the government.